Dualities

I’m still reading through Pinchbeck’s 2012 book. I’m savoring it, reading bits and pieces on the treadmill at the gym. So this morning, 5/25, Memorial Day, I’m reading about alien abductions, where Pinchbeck talks about Whitley Strieber’s experiences, detailed in Communion. Pinchbeck asks, “Are the visitors (the Grays Strieber writes about) ‘real’ or ‘imaginary?’ They are both and they are neither.” Pinchbeck likens them to quantum phenomena, a kind of duality that is both wave and particle. “…they do not exist or not exist, nor do they both not exist and not not exist.”

From this,he veers into Tibetan Buddhism, and cites from Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State, “Duality is the real root of our suffering and of all our conflicts. All our concepts and beliefs, no matter how profound they may seem, are like nets which traps us in dualism.”

So later in the day, I pick up my current issue of Mountain Astrologer and turn to an excerpt from a new book about the meanings of the seven traditional planets – the sun through Saturn. “According to some esoteric theories, at the moment of creation the invisible One broke into a visible two, appearing as opposites that characterize our world: light and dark, up and down, good and bad, masculine and feminine…Each astrological symbol also reflects this duality by containing within itself both an up side and a down side…”

So now this duality thing has my attention. I’m a Gemini. It’s one of two signs in the zodiac represented by two of something – Pisces, a pair of fish swimming in opposite directions and Gemini, the twins. I live with duality daily. Some days I’m yin, some days I’m yang, some days I am both.

I walk outside and am greeted by the two stray cats we feed – a female and male, Smoky and Big Head, yin and yang. I return to the article in the astrology magazine and read about how Mercury, the planet that rules Gemini, is the alchemical hermaphrodite, who may “also represent not just the unredeemed matter of the alchemist’s early experiments but the final outcomes of his efforts- the marriage of the sun and moon, the restoration of all dualities into one.”

And then I run across the story about the king and his double, another story about dualities, posted yesterday, 5/27. The message? I don’t know. This isn’t like Max’s synchronicity about two magical teapots, not that definitive. Maybe these loops are simply addressing the duality of my own reality, the extraordinary and the mundane, the vivid and the muted, the good and the bad, the black and the white, the sacred and the profane.
Trish